Re: Asus A8V Deluxe, Xfree display problems with BIOS 1011
On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 03:41:12PM +0000, Jean-Luc Coulon (f5ibh) wrote:
> I've an ASUS A8V Deluxe with an ASUS A9250T/D video card.
> I've just updated my BIOS from 1009 to 1011.
>
> After this update, the machine boot fine and the display works in
> cosole mode but while swtiching to X when gdm starts, I get a black
> screen with only the cursor image in white.
Well running 1009 still on mine and it works perfectly, which of course
means I have no reason to consider upgrading the bios. Upgrading is for
fixing problems. If you don't have any, don't upgrade, sice the only
thing it can do is either nothing or break something. It can't be
better than all working after all.
> The machine is still alive and I can access it via ssh. But I cannot
> even swith to a console and try a "blind reboot" with <Alt><Ctrl><Fn>
> and then log in. I cannot kill the X server with <Alt><Ctrl><Backspace>.
>
> If I boot the machine using Ubuntu live CD, it works.
> If then I reboot (not power off the box) the system, then my normal
> Debian system works.
Does ubuntu use vesa or something instead of the binary only driver
(which does agp drm stuff)?
> I've reverted to BIOS revison 1009 and this fix the problem.
>
> I've asked Asus support, the reply (In French) is that "they have no
> UNIX/linux support for the moment, sorry for the inconvenient".
>
> Do you havea any idea of what can be the cause of this problem ?
>
> I use the free Xfree86 driver "radeon".
> The display is an IBM P200, 20" tested at various resolutions.
The monitor will not crash the machine. :) Well unless the DDC parser
is garbage and the data is bad.
If you have no problems with 1009, just keep using it.
Some years ago I had a bios upgrade (I used to think you should always
upgrade too) which made the adaptec 2940uw card just disappear (never
initialized) which of course made booting from the scsi hd a bit of a
problem. Fortunately I kept the old bios on a floppy so I could boot
the system from floppy (after disabling the scsi bios in the adaptec
setup since it actuall crashed the boot when enabled), after which I
could downgrade the bios, then reanable the scsi bios and the system was
back to normal. Now I only upgrade the bios when I have stuff not
working that is listed as fixed.
dvdwriter firmware on the other hand I do find uses in upgrading since
they keep adding support for newer media (and sometimes they up the
speed of the drive too like on the PX716A which went from 4x to 6x DL
support).
I guess you can send back a message to asus that the 1011 bios breaks
nvidia and ati accelerated X drivers while 1009 works. Maybe they can
consider what they may have broken. Who knows what else it might affect
in suttle ways.
Len Sorensen
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